Demand Profile Generators

 

Introduction:

The purpose of this section is to define why we created a tool to generate the community's demand profile as well as present an outline of how this tool works.

Why ?

During the progress of the project the team has identified that in order to proceed to the third step of the methodology (offsetting) there is a need to generate the energy demand profile of the community being analyzed. The energy demand profile is essential in the offsetting procedure, in order to ensure the proper sizing of the Renewable Energy supply.

Unfortunately the majority of the R.E applications are using the National-Typical demand profile which is not taking under consideration the diversification in demand different communities might have. The team has identified that the energy demand profile can vary significantly among communities due to several reasons. The most important are presented below.

• Different Housing Stock
• Different occupancy types
• Different consumer behavior

Unfortunately the later is not easy to measure and thus not easy to model. However, it can affect the energy demand by a factor of 20-50 % as indicated by an extended research [2]. Developing a model that can predict the energy consumption with respect to Social factors, like consumer behavior, requires extended research that is currently being curried out and is not among this project's objectives.

For the needs of this project the team has developed a tool that can generate the energy demand profile for a wide variety of residential communities. It consists of two different parts; the Electricity Demand generator (E.D.p. generator) and the Heating Demand generator (H.D.p. generator).

Electricity Demand profile generator (E.D.p):

The E.D.p. generator is a tool that was developed to generate the electricity demand profile of a whole community. The code is based on probability models that predict the possibility of each household to operate a certain amount of appliances on a certain time of the day for differrent end users (occupancy types). The database of this tool was compiled with respect to the National statistical data for electricity used in appliances in UK households [1]. Furthermore, the usage patterns incorporated in the tool were extracted from research in the UK (go to references) and a detailed survey conducted in the Riverside community, Stirling (Case Study).

The tool was originally designed to provide quick and accurate results about the electricity demand of a single household as well as the whole community.

The E.D.p's only inputs are:

    • The Census Demographic results, which care available for every community in the UK.
    • The annual electricity consumption, which can be obtained simply by making an enquiry to the utility company that serves the community.

    The tool is using an hourly step calculator, but we belive this is enough to provide a rough estimation of the daily electricity demand. However, this tool can be developed even more to implement an, up to, five minutes time step so that the results can be used directly to introduce a community CHP scheme.

    To use this tool online please enable "MACRO" commands in the EXCEL version you have installed first.(how ?)

    To use this tool simply click here.

    The link above will open an spreadsheet on line in which you will be asked to insert the Census Demographic data for the community. You will be also asked to insert the annual electricity consumption of the community. However, the interface is set for our case study, but you can click the defferenciate button so you can use any community's annual electricity consumption. For any other enquires regarding the Electricity Demand Profile Generator, please email esru@strath.ac.uk. specifying the name of the project and the year that it has been conducted (2006-2007).

(See how it works)

 

Heating Demand profile generator (H.D.p) (use it online):

The H.D.p generator is a tool that was developed to generate the Heating Demand profile. Using the building stock in the Riverside community (Case Study),as this was indicated by our Survey, and the Scottish building construction data, as they are defined in S.D.EM. software, we created 480 ESP-r models. Running these models we generated a database for this building stock which includes details about the daily heating energy required for each type of house. Our next task was to develop an algorithm related with a user friendly interface in order to process and present this large amount of data. The outcome was a frienfly user interface that can generate the energy demand profile in terms of energy delivered to heating. The following link presents a schematic outline of the "Heating Demand profile generator (picture).

to use this tool simply click here

The link above will open a spreadsheet online in which you will can navigate using the tags provided. the main page is called "specific housetype demand profile". This page is useful if you would like to generate the specific house type demand profile. Using the button named "Go to the community demand profile generator" you are introduced in the interface of the Community Demand profile generator. Following the instructions provided, you can generate every community's heating demand profile simply by inserting the following data:

    • Census Demographics
    • More details about the building stock of the community

The interface is set to represent the case study we used to test this tool. However, you can easily insert the data of the community you would like to generate the demand profile, simply by inserting different values in the appropriate cells. For any enquires, please email esru@strath.ac.uk specifying the name of the project as well as the year it has been conducted (2006-2007).